9/11 Started Here | Yankee Classic

After all those years working the dawn flights at Logan, and then for 16 more at Portland, Mike Tuohey still awakens by 4 a.m., searching for first light over the river that cuts through the marsh. He loves the stillness. The house he shares with his second wife, a flight attendant, rises from the tall grasses like a handsome boat; from its windows, he watches seabirds dart over the wildlife preserve that stretches to the ocean. This is when everything seems right. The promise of a day ahead — working his land, coaxing a garden from the marsh. “It’s where I find peace,” he says.

He’s 60, and until the airline downsized two years ago, he’d been with US Airways (formerly Allegheny Airlines) since he was 21, just out of the Army. “I was going to work until I died at that counter,” he says. “I loved my work.” He grew up poor in Roxbury, Massachusetts, an Irish-Italian kid who left school at 16, full of attitude and street smarts. “I’m the first in my family to own a house,” he says with pride. “I had five brothers and my father had five brothers, and I was the first.”

Each day at his home in Scarborough, Maine, begins the same: At dawn he walks down a dirt road to collect the Boston Globe from his mailbox. He walks back. He flicks on CNN and sips coffee. He lights a Winston, the first of many. This day promises to be gorgeous — warm, blue sky, sea breezes.

He’s expecting a visitor, a reporter, at noon who will ask about a day five years ago, a day Mike Tuohey remembers began so beautifully. “The kind of morning when you sniff the air and think, ‘Oh, it’s getting cooler now.’ A spectacular morning. The sky the bluest of blues. A day so perfect you’d never want to be anywhere else.”

That morning, September 11, 2001, he drove six miles to the Portland International Jetport. He was dressed smartly in his blue US Airways jacket, crisp white shirt, red and blue tie. His sandy hair and mustache were immaculate, as always. He stood at his usual first-class and preferred passengers post. A slow Tuesday morning at summer’s end. There were flights to Philly, New York, and Pittsburgh; a 19-passenger commuter prop was leaving at 6 a.m. for Boston. It was 5:40, and all the Boston passengers seemed to be on their way upstairs. He told the ticket agent alongside him that he was going to take a smoke break, but then he saw two men walking toward his counter.

That’s what his visitor will talk to him about. The same as CNN, Good Morning America, a National Geographic documentary crew, and Oprah. They all came calling after his name appeared in declassified documents following the release of The 9/11 Commission Report. He talked to everyone, and then he just had to stop. “I thought I could put it behind me,” he says. “I thought I could just grab it and confront it. I figured, the more I confront it, I won’t let it bother me.” He pauses. “I was wrong. There’s never a day without thinking about that day. It’s just there. It’s in your blood, your system. Your feelings. It’s like the sky — always there. It’s like you know your name. How do you try and not know your name?”

In the early afternoon, Mike Tuohey sits with his visitor in his sun-soaked kitchen. “I motioned them over,” he says. “These guys showed up 20 minutes prior. Back then, I didn’t think anything of it. Back then, it was all set up for convenience of passengers.” They checked two bags, carrying two more.

2 Responses to 9/11 Started Here | Yankee Classic

Anyone, ANYONE who would suggest that Mr. Tuohey is at fault should be ashamed of themselves. This was going to happen no matter who was at that counter. Mr. Tuohey is simply one more victim of the events of that day. God Bless you Mr. Tuohey.

Bless his heart. He is not at fault. He did his job. Period. There was absolutely no way for him (or anyone else) to know what was coming that fateful day. He is no more at fault than any other American who did their job that day. One day, Mr. Tuohey, you’ll have to find forgiveness and let go of the anger and pain. You’re not at fault.

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